Dressed to Kill · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Kate Miller sits on a gallery bench with one glove off, writing out a grocery list, and then her pen stops. She has felt herself being looked at. For the next several minutes nobody speaks. The camera glides, Donaggio's strings climb, a stranger surfaces and vanishes between the canvases, and Kate follows and is followed through rooms that keep folding back on themselves. It is one of the most sustained wordless passages in American cinema, and every second of it is built out of looking: who sees whom, who knows they are seen, and what the camera knows that no one inside the frame does.

Begin there, because De Palma's whole art lives in that triangle of glances, and Deleuze hands us its exact name. At the far edge of what he calls the movement-image (the ordinary cinema in which a person perceives a situation and acts to change it) sits the relation-image, or mental-image, and Deleuze files it under Hitchcock. Here the picture stops being one link in a chain of action and becomes a knot of relations that only a third party can tie: the audience. We are not really watching events. We are watching what the characters' looks mean to one another, while we hold knowledge they lack. That privileged knowledge is the whole engine of suspense. When we know the blonde with the razor is waiting in the elevator and Kate does not, the dread is ours to carry, not hers. Rear Window taught De Palma this exact structure, and the dossier names it precisely as the implicated spectator: the film makes us complicit before the violence ever arrives.

If the relation-image is the architecture, perception is the material. Deleuze's perception-image is the image that foregrounds the act and the angle of seeing, a vision with a source and a slant rather than a neutral window. Dressed to Kill is almost nothing else. The camera borrows Kate's eyes as she scans the museum, then the killer's as a victim is tracked, then teenage Peter's as he stakes out the psychiatrist's doorway with the time-lapse rig he has built himself. Every charged space belongs to somebody's point of view. De Palma then adds the twist Deleuze calls the dicisign: an image in which the camera perceives a character who is herself perceiving, so that we begin to feel the camera's own presence as a watcher in the room. This is the Peeping Tom inheritance the lineage flags, the gaze that is also a weapon. The shot does not just show us a look; it implicates the looking, ours included, and refuses to pretend it is innocent.

Two finer terms catch what the style does from there. For Deleuze a symbol is an object that condenses a film's organizing relation into a single form, and De Palma's is the split-diopter shot, the lens that holds a near object and a far figure in equal sharp focus at once. Divided attention made visible, and behind it a divided self. The mirrors do the same work, doubling and fracturing the body wherever the staging can manage it. A demark, in turn, is his word for an anomaly that breaks a habit and forces us to read the image instead of merely following it. The film's boldest stroke is precisely that: it murders its star a third of the way through. The habit of identification is cut, and we have to reattach midstream to Liz the call girl and Peter the tinkerer. Narrative itself becomes the demark, the thing that will not fit the chain.

And the killer. Those splitting mirrors point toward what Deleuze calls the crystal-image, the moment when a person and her reflection, an identity and its double, can no longer be told apart. Dr. Elliott and the blonde Bobbi are one body holding two selves, kept indiscernible until a clinical voice (another lift straight from Psycho) walks in to separate them and name the pathology. The crystal is cracked open by a lecture, which is exactly the move that divides the film's admirers from its detractors.

Place it in its line and the achievement sharpens. The museum stalk and its music-over-dialogue grammar come from Vertigo, with Donaggio openly extending the Herrmann tradition; the designed, glamorous murder comes from the giallo of Blood and Black Lace; the witness trapped behind glass comes from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; the rug-pull and the closing diagnosis come from Psycho. De Palma's own invention is not any one device. It is the welding of the giallo's murder-as-spectacle to Hitchcock's moral structure of the guilty look, carried by a fluency, Steadicam and split-diopter and score in place of speech, that lifts suspense toward opera. What he did to the thriller was make the act of watching the film's true subject, so that you cannot look without being caught looking. The pickets that met the film in 1980 were reacting to the very thing Deleuze would isolate as its form. Being made complicit in the gaze is not comfortable, and De Palma declined to let anyone off.

So watch it again, and try this. Stop tracking the plot and track the looks instead. Notice the camera noticing. The film was never really about who the killer turns out to be. It is about the seat it keeps putting you in, and how much, against your better sense, you enjoy the view.